Actually, the runner up are there in case the pic for if that month gets picked for the cover ( all of the winning photos go into a competition for the cover photo) then they will take the runner up and make that the photo for that month.( ex: July gets picked for cover, July runner up will now be July month photo)

OK, I have gone through the winners... I had to break a couple ties, but November/December is a real problem. I'm going to contact some of the people who submitted the second and third-place images, and see what they think. The big issue is, technically, both winners are Christmas-themed images.

I'm noticing that the person who could get "bumped" actually has at least one other image that got in, so maybe this will work out just beautifully. E-mails sent.

Suebee it looks like my entry made the cut!!! I'm so excited but I have a question. I know the rules called for an unedited photo....that's what I submitted. I think the picture looks a little better tweaked just a bit in Photoshop. May I submit the edited version to you? I think it looks a little too dark here. I didn't want to ask until the main polls closed... I know you didn't want people knowing whose picture was whose.

If you want to send a new version, that's fine... I usually want them unedited because I want them the fullest, biggest size possible, and a lot of sites (like FB and photobucket) shrink them down. I don't mind some color correction. I do tweak the levels on some of them before I put them in the polls, and sometimes do a little more later if needed, but I'm using GIMP now instead of Photoshop, and I find the color-correcting tools quite frustrating by comparison.

If you have the knowledge and means to tweak them to make them lighter, brighter, and lookin' great for print, I don't mind!

I do tweak the levels on some of them before I put them in the polls, and sometimes do a little more later if needed, but I'm using GIMP now instead of Photoshop, and I find the color-correcting tools quite frustrating by comparison.

OT - I forgot to comment on this earlier. When I upgraded my computer, I could no longer activate my archaic version of Photoshop because the online activation for it no longer existed (I think it was CS1 - so really outdated, but still did everything I needed and cost me a ton of money at the time). A friend of mine suggested I try GIMP and being a software engineer, I am used to using freeware/shareware tools that can be a little difficult to navigate. However, I did not get along with GIMP at all.

I actually ended up downloading the free trial of Photoshop Elements and then later purchasing it after I verified it could do the things I needed. When I purchased Photoshop many years ago - Elements was crap they were giving away for free with any camera or scanner and it couldn't do much of anything. The current version can do almost everything my old version of Photoshop could do (or at least all of the features I used - things like levels and masks and effects and unsharpen mask and photo filters - it could even handle printer calibration profiles so that what you see on screen matches what prints from the printer). It took a while to figure out how to do some of these things as the interface is dumbed down - and sometimes it is a little clunkier, but if you know Photoshop, you can figure most of it out by tinkering and the rest out by Googling it. I think Amazon is currently selling the current version of elements for about $50 (not sure if that is a Black Friday sale or regular price).

So if you are frustrated with GIMP, you might want to try the free trial of Elements from Adobe's website and see if it meets your needs.